Slate Investigates If It's Really Illegal To Fart On A Sandwich

By cwaltersApril 19, 2009

Nina Rastogi decided to look into food tampering laws in the wake of our Domino’s Pizza story last week. It turns out you can spit in food in Ohio without fear of jail time so long as you don’t have a communicable disease. Ohio is clearly the place to work if you are an angry restaurant employee, and the place to avoid if you’re a diner who easily angers waitstaff.

Bad luck for the rogue employees, though: North Carolina, where the Domino’s incident took place, is actually quite strict about food tampering.

[In North Carolina,] you can be charged with a Class I felony for knowingly distributing food that could cause “mild physical discomfort without any lasting effect.” (Technically, you don’t even need to distribute it-just leaving the food somewhere “in a position of human accessibility” is enough to get you charged.) If the hapless Domino’s employees are convicted, they could get up to one year in jail.